United Way of Lee, Hendry & Glades kicked off their annual campaign with a “Day of Action” on December 12, 2009. The goal seemed lofty but achievable: gather enough food and volunteers and prepare 100,000 meals in 2 (two) 4-hour shifts.

That’s right – one hundred thousand meals in the equivalent of one working day. That requires ACTION and TEAMWORK!

Promotional Incentives is pleased to have provided the “Live United T-shirts” for the campaign.

As you watch the video, take notice of the variety and number of imprinted T-shirts being worn by volunteers. This illustrates an important PR benefit of logoed apparel – visual reinforcement of your brand. Event/Campaign T-shirts also build a sense of teamwork as volunteers from different businesses joined together to accomplish the goal or mission.

Branding reminder: When company execs employees, or volunteers are photographed or videotaped, always wear company shirts!

Please check out the UTube video and see how they over-achieved their goal. You will be inspired and feel better about our world, I promise. United Way Lee Day of Action Video

I enjoyed a unique experience this week – outstanding customer service from the U.S. Post Office. That’s right, the post office.

Earlier this week I arrived at the Page Field Main Office in Fort Myers at 4:55 p.m. (thinking they closed at 5:00), with 131 packages to mail first class. (Can you picture the looks of scorn from those in line behind me?) The first sigh of relief came when I found out they were open until 5:30, and the second was being called to an open window pretty quickly.

As I lay my bins up on the counter, credit card in hand, thinking that I could just swipe the card, pay the first class postage, and be out of there. The sweet elderly lady Marti informed me that they did not have time to run that many individual metered stickers and that I would have to put 3 individual stamps on each one, I sighed in a different way.

The dilemma: stay at the office and apply almost 400 stamps before they closed or buy the stamps and do it that night or the next day, delaying the mailing a day (any of you who do “bulk mailings” know how much work it takes to get to this point and I was resolved to get these in the mail the date of the letter).

It was then my postal savior Fran arrived to say she would help me. And help me she did, by opening an office and sitting at a table with me helping me apply the stamps to each package.

We chatted about business, the post office, the economy, difficulties bulk mailing (which is what led us to mail fewer calendars via first class this year)…and we finished at 5:29 both feeling like we had just run a race. I offered to carry the heavy bins, which she declined, and off Fran went to the back room to get my packages in the mail. The next day there were already five positive emails to our calendar mailing.

The USPS is usually in the news in a not-so-favorable light, so I thought it important to give a positive shout out, and to publicize the notion that sometimes, good old-fashioned customer service exists, even from our government workers at the USPS.